THEATER REVIEW

THEATER REVIEW; Guilt So Deep That It Derails Words and Intentions

By BEN BRANTLEY

Published: February 15, 2000

PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 11—
Words stick and clog in the mouths of the title characters of J. T. Rogers's ''White People'' as though language were a gummy, swelling substance as difficult to spit out as to swallow.

References to paralyzed tongues, to speech turning ''thick and clunky'' in the utterance, to a frightening verbal impotence: the images recur throughout the monologues that make up this carefully arranged portrait of forms of ingrained racism, which runs at the Plays and Players Theater here through Sunday. The diagnosis is clear: quite simply, words fail.

''White People,'' which has been directed by Gus Reyes for the Philadelphia Theater Company and features a commandingly sensitive performance from Robert Sean Leonard (of the Broadway productions of ''Arcadia'' and ''The Iceman Cometh''), isn't itself exactly short on words. The three quite different figures presented in the drama are all, by most lights, exceptionally articulate. Even the former homecoming queen, who is so defensive about her lack of higher education, has an assortment of lyric metaphors at her disposal.

Yet they are all reduced to admitting that they don't have the tools to describe, much less to allay, the feelings of discomfort and violence that have taken over their lives. The white people of ''White People'' -- a New York college professor, a Midwestern law firm executive and a North Carolina housewife -- have all been brought into demoralizing contact with people who are not white, and they're fumbling to sort out the consequent guilt and blame.

Post-performance discussion groups, an increasingly common phenomenon in American theater, have been an important part of ''White People,'' which was previously seen in Los Angeles, and the work is probably best appreciated as a preface to such forums. Its clear and worthy intention is to use its monologues to further that much-discussed, much-thwarted open dialogue on race in the United States.

As a self-contained piece of theater, however, it isn't entirely satisfying. ''White People'' isn't simple-minded, and it exercises both courage and caution in trying to define the nature and causes of prejudice in its characters. Mr. Rogers, who is 31, plants the echoing ideas and imagery in his text with the thoughtfulness of a parent hiding candy for an Easter egg hunt. ''Just look,'' he seems to be saying to his audience. ''The evidence is all there -- not only on the stage, but also in your own lives.'' But if Mr. Rogers doesn't talk down to theatergoers, he doesn't always avoid condescending to his characters. The cultural detail used to bring them to life can seem more imposed than organic. Only Alan Harris, the college professor played by Mr. Leonard, seems a largely natural creation, and there are stretches in ''White People'' where momentum falters because of this credibility gap.

Each of the characters addresses, with varying degrees of self-awareness, a different archetypal response to non-Caucasian cultures. Mara Lynn Doddson (Carole Healey), the Fayetteville, N.C., mother of a disabled child, embodies the indignation of a working class that has seen its jobs taken away by immigrants. (''We have priority,'' she says. ''We were here first.'')

Martin Bahmueller (John Ottavino), a lawyer who has moved from Brooklyn to St. Louis, is of the class that has fled the cities to be, as he puts it, ''in a community of people who look like me.'' Alan, the seemingly open-minded academic, finds his liberalism challenged both by a harrowing event he keeps putting off describing and the exoticism of his most stimulating student, who is black or, as he quickly amends, African-American.

Mr. Leonard renders these apologetic changes in terminology with affecting awkwardness. And it is Alan the professor who paradoxically best demonstrates in emotional terms what some academics have been saying for years about the corruption and inadequacy of an outmoded ruling-class language. Mr. Leonard's Alan does indeed seem to suffer from a swollen tongue and a feeling of his own words deflating as soon as he utters them.

Martin, who has the grimmest and bloodiest story to tell, is more of a textbook study in dramatic irony, with the audience clued in on what he doesn't understand himself. Still, Mr. Ottavino, his firm voice fraying with exasperation, does a fine job of suggesting both Martin's armor of arrogance, kept in place by a rigidly maintained code of dress and speech, and the widening chinks he cannot disguise.

With her habit of lamenting the days when she ruled the halls of her high school as the prettiest thing in town, Mara Lynn is a bit too much like a faded-glory figure from an old Bruce Springsteen song. Played with shimmering popular-girl poise by Ms. Healey, the character is also given a declamatory eloquence that doesn't always ring true.

Indeed, while Mr. Reyes's direction keeps up a certain degree of suspense, elegantly underscored by Phil Monat's lighting, ''White People'' doesn't sidestep that flatness that descends when you're aware of an author playing ventriloquist to his characters. One thinks of Neil LaBute's similarly structured but far more compelling evening of monologues, ''Bash,'' which stripped away its Mormon characters' wholesome facades to reveal the presence of evil.

Mr. Rogers, on the other hand, has appointed himself a harder task: that of looking beneath the surface to find not evil but uncertainty and to present that uncertainty as a part of the texture of a country and its history. ''White People'' is ultimately more about issues than characters, and like so many plays, it suffers from the choice of emphasis. But it is admirable in its insistence that its problems can't be dealt with until they are openly identified. That, it would seem, is the work's principal reason to be.